Pre Class, Horkheimer & Adorno, Ann

One of the opening lines of Horkheimer and Adorno’s essay “The Culture Industry” is, “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness.” They talk about how everything in culture is becoming more and more the same as well as connected. This is a lot of what we are talking about in my Social Media class. These days television shows, movies and radio stations all have websites. Websites these days also usually connect to Twitter, MySpace and Facebook making everything flow together. Another example of this maybe would be Disney. They have theme parks, movies, websites as well as there own television and radio station. The company spans upon vast forms of media. The essay argues that the same points are incorporated into all media forms so that something will appeal to all audiences. I can see how there are certain genres that appeal to certain people and these genres are usually repeated throw all types of media. Not many original pieces far away from these genres. People seem to think that there needs to be a category for everything. The media tends to be criticized for being very liberal and this can have huge effects on society. People tend to not view the media with a critical approach and although they do not do it intentionally end up mimicking the views of what they view in the various forms of media that they see everyday. This essay seems to dramatically put into theory what I have learned in CMC classes as well as heard from other sources about the dangers of the media. It took a lot of points for the authors to come to these conclusions so at times I did get a little lost reading this article but I think I was able to draw the main points.